follow linkCornford & Cross’s other work in this exhibition, ‘The Lost Horizon’, was created in 2003, and represented the activity on the London Stock Exchange on a daily basis. ‘Black Narcissus’, by contrast, presents the fortunes of the FTSE over the course of the entire decade since that work.

Both computer gaming technology and financial markets’ computer technology has been transformed over the last decade. Cornford & Cross ask us to think about the connections between the two realms. The means to conduct share trading have been changed dramatically by computer-led ‘high-frequency trading’ where computers calculate split-second differences in value and exploit them to make marginal profits which accumulate over time. Human interaction has become distant from the ‘market’ to an unprecedented degree. On the other hand, the virtual landscapes available to inhabit in computer games are equally more sophisticated and immersive. The fantasy landscapes that gamers can place themselves into are of a quite new order.

Detoxification of Capitalism and Freedom

Jane Lawson’s time-lapse video documents the slow recuperation of free-market advocates and their texts by natural forces. The work ‘is an attempt to symbolically detoxify, transform and destroy the institutions of the global financial system with oyster mushrooms. Oyster mushrooms have a wide range of detoxifying properties. They can clean up E.Coli in watercourses, have anti-viral properties and can transform a pile of diesel-contaminated soil into a thriving ecosystem. These mushrooms are only one of many fungi that can destroy or transform toxins.’ Free market thought is, for her, an intellectual ‘toxin’ that we need to be cleansed of.

All That Is Solid Melts into Air

Mark Boulos invites us to imagine how social mechanisms such as financial derivatives are able to shape individuals’ lives – indeed those of whole communities, or nations. On the left screen, Boulos shows traders in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange – on the very first day of the 2008 credit crisis. On the right, we see footage from his time living with Nigerian fishermen, some of whom were members of the militant group ‘Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta’. Both the traders and the insurgents want to control oil, and are united in a struggle to command the resources – physical or abstracted – that would allow that.

Financial District

Immo Klink lives in the City of London, and has been photographing both the demographic diversity of the City’s workers for fifteen years, and financial centres worldwide during the same period. His street photography does not take an immediate ethical stance on the City’s diverse activities, but asks us to take part in his long-term survey of the types of people – social, ethnic, generational, and political – who occupy it as if a landscape. The images also include a number from the series ‘Collision Course’ taken in 2008, during the month that Lehman Brothers collapsed.